WOONSOCKET — The gray stone walls and shiny razor wire of the Adult Correctional Institutions are the obvious image of the state’s correctional system. At any given time, the eight-prison complex in Cranston can hold as many as 4,000 inmates. But outside its walls more than six times as many people are living in Rhode Island’s cities and towns, serving sentences for their crimes.

They are the estimated 27,000 men and women on either probation or parole from the ACI. Most of them are in the northern part of the state, with Providence and Pawtucket accounting for nearly 40 percent. Woonsocket is third, with about 1,400, or 1 out of every 23 city residents, on some kind of supervised release.

And, according to ACI statistics, about 55 percent of them wind up back in prison, sentenced for new crimes, within three years of getting out.

Thursday night, representatives of government agencies and social service organizations gathered in Harris Hall for a program called “Creating Second Chances,” about ways to keep those 1 in 23 residents in Woonsocket and out of the ACI.

The audience heard from two members of the state’s criminal justice system: Peter Slom, a unit manager at the state’s Training School for juvenile offenders, and Luis M. Estrada, office manager and paralegal for Providence lawyer Angel Tavares. Each of them had a deeper understanding of the prison and probation system than they got from their jobs. Estrada’s came from serving 22 years of a 70-year sentence for a 1982 jewelry factory robbery; Slom did three years for a 1990 cocaine conviction, finishing his probation just last year.

Slom said Friday, April 13, 1990, the day he was arrested on multiple cocaine charges, was, in retrospect, “the luckiest day of my life.”

He did three years in the ACI and more time in a drug-treatment halfway house. He waited tables and took adult education courses, and later found work as a drug abuse counselor. The pay was lousy, he said, but the work rewarding. Then came Rhode Island College and a degree in social work that led to the job at the Training School.

He said the transition from prison to the outside world can be jarring. Inmates leave the structured and regulated environment of a prison to a place where they have little or no money, no car, no job and probably pressure from gangs or other acquaintances who were part of the reason they were incarcerated in the first place.

“It doesn’t sound easy to come out of prison, does it,” he said.

Estrada said the reentry process has to start within the offender’s own mind.

“We, as prisoners, cannot expect the community to accept us unless we prepare,” Estrada said.

When he talked about his journey from the ACI, Estrada recited the names of teachers, drug abuse counselors and lawyers who helped him along the way. While in prison, he took courses, got certified in quality control management, studied law in classes and on his own and developed a reputation as a gifted legal writer.

Estrada said his job story is not a common one for parolees. He had an offer before he even got out of prison because he and Taveras were childhood friends and his parole lawyer was Richard K. Corley, Taveras’ law partner.

Estrada said he made it work, but opportunities in prison aren’t plentiful.

“All I know is, I’ll keep trying,” he said, “but the last 15 years, I’m watching the system get stripped of available programs.”

Jesse Capece, an employment specialist at the Providence-based Family Life Center, an agency that provides support services for released offenders, said the system requires motivated men and women who want to change their lives and employers who are willing to believe that they have changed.

“There has to be some innate, underlying part of the business person who wants to give someone a second shot,” Capece said.

He argued against the stereotype of people on prison or parole being untrustworthy because of their records. He said in some cases that makes them not a bad risk, but a good bet.

There are financial incentives. The federal government offers a $2,400 per hire tax credit to companies that employ a convict in the first year of release and a free $5,000 bond coverage against money or property losses due to employee dishonesty. The state also offers tax credits of up to 50 percent of pay for on-the-job training for hired offenders.

“They’re not working for just a paycheck,” Capece said. “They are looking for the pride of work, the structure of work. They want to prove they are not the fool on the criminal background check. They are going to be your most reliable guys.”

“Truth is, they know how hard it is to find a job with a record,” he said. “So once they’ve got a job, they aren’t going to do anything to mess it up.”

jhill@projo.com